Thomson is a professor at MIT who has written the classic defense
of abortion (1971). This collection of her papers on various moral
topics begins with that essay, and here, as in the other articles,
she focuses on the idea of rights: how do we determine who has the
right to do something or not? In the abortion case, she argues that
the pregnant woman is forced into a situation where she must choose
whether or not to sustain a life inside her when doing so infringes
on her rights in a number of ways, i.e., the right to life does not
imply the right to use someone else's body. This is moral
philosophy, but the emphasis is on what rights someone has in the
face of other people's needs or rights. This is carried throughout
the essays. For example, "The Trolley Problem" considers whether it
is right for a trolley driver to divert the train from a track on
which it will kill five people onto one where it will kill one
person. He may, she argues, turn it. But what of a surgeon who can
save five lives by transplanting organs removed from a single
individual who will then die? Other essays consider preferential
hiring, the right to privacy, and governmental control over
people's behavior. Throughout, Jarvis' style of constructing
examples to flush out moral points gives the reader a good taste of
this kind of moral philosophy. The lay person may find the rigor of
the analysis tough going. But it is an excellent reference book for
working on the problem it raises, and it gives a taste of analytic
moral philosophy at its most developed level. (Kirkus Reviews)
Moral theory should be simple: the moral theorist attends to
ordinary human action to explain what makes some acts right and
others wrong, and we need no microscope to observe a human act. Yet
no moral theory that is simple captures all of the morally relevant
facts. In a set of vivid examples, stories, and cases Judith
Thomson shows just how wide an array of moral considerations bears
on all but the simplest of problems. She is a philosophical analyst
of the highest caliber who can tease a multitude of implications
out of the story of a mere bit of eavesdropping. She is also a
master teller of tales which have a philosophical bite. Beyond
these pleasures, however, she brings new depth of understanding to
some of the most pressing moral issues of the moment, notably
abortion. Thomson's essays determinedly confront the most difficult
questions: What is it to have a moral right to life, or any other
right? What is the relation between the infringement of such rights
and restitution? How is rights theory to deal with the imposition
of risk?
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